You might wonder why a book about PostgreSQL administration actually contains a chapter on indexing and performance tuning. The answer is quite simple actually; extensive experience in database engineering and support shows that a poor indexing strategy will, on a regular basis, totally cripple user experience as well as performance. It happens on a regular basis that a bad overall indexing strategy totally destroys user experience as well as performance.

Therefore, it is one of my primary goals to provide as much information as possible about hunting down wrong or missing indexes so that you, the reader, can easily optimize your system to enjoy the full power of PostgreSQL.

In this chapter, you will be guided through PostgreSQL indexing, and you will learn how to fix performance issues and find performance bottlenecks. Understanding indexing will be vital to your success as a DBA—you cannot count on software engineers to get this right straightaway...